Breaking The Need for Something.

I have, for most of my life been dealing with addiction, and I’m sure you have been too. 

Addiction can be one of the hardest downward spirals to come back from. My hope with this short essay is to help you break them and realize you don’t need them. The short of it is realizing YOU have complete control over what you do and have a responsibility to make the right choices for your body. Most people that I have talked about breaking an addiction often look up at the mountain of work that will go along with it. This is absolutely the worst way to look at it. It’s okay to acknowledge that the mountain is there, but you have to look forward one step at a time. This idea of small achievements is really the secret sauce behind my success in breaking the hold some activities had in my life. 

More often than not I always seem to realize I’m addicted to something when it's already too late. Now, by no means have I ever been addicted to things like hardcore drugs - But, I know I have been addicted to a few things that have brought my quality of life down. I am going to be talking about three of the past addictions that I have, for the most part, overcome. Those being: smoking, social drinking, and video games.

To make things easier, I broke each topic down into its own little section. So, feel free to jump around while you read or don’t. This is just an essay, not the cops. 

SMOKING

I’m sure that if there is one thing most people are going to be addicted to, it's going to be smoking. I got into smoking in the most cliche sort of way; I had just turned 18 and I figured, why not. It started out as only smoking whenever I was at parties or with friends, but it quickly turned into me smoking a few cigarettes a day. I ended up smoking for a little over a year until I started to realize it was a mistake. It was ultimately my now fiancé that led me to my eventual drop. When we met I had already been noticing the effects that smoking had been having on my body. As someone that grew up with childhood asthma, smoking was already not the best idea. So once I started getting that tightness in my chest that I was all too familiar with, I rightfully started to freak out. So, I tried to give up smoking cold turkey, and surprisingly, it worked! Kidding. I’m kidding. I stopped for about a week before I went right back to it. It was obvious that I needed a new way to tackle the issue. So, I decided to start off by lessening the number of cigarettes I could smoke in a day. So, I went from smoking about 5 cigarettes a day, to only taking in 4 a day. I kept this up for about a month until I was down to about 2 a day.

It was around this time that I realized I was no longer smoking because I needed to, I was smoking because I wanted to. That was the realization that ultimately let me stop. instead of looking at the huge task of quitting, I looked at it as just smoking one less cigarette. Just ones less cigarette is something that is totally doable. Looking at it as something that is small and more manageable, I was able to position myself into a mindset where the cigarettes where no longer in control, I was. 

SOCIAL DRINKING

Hello darkness my old friend. Social drinking is definitely my freshest wound. This really started up around the time that I moved into my own place. Once I realized I wouldn’t have to worry about my parents seeing me drunk, I was off to the races. Lets first start off with some background info. I, along with my lovely fiancé, moved into our first apartment near the very popular downtown area of our favorite city. The downtown area of this city is loaded with pubs, bars, and clubs throughout. This was not an issue when I lived 15 miles away, but once I got a place that walking distance away, well you can imagine that I quickly became a local at those establishments. At first, I was just heading down on Tuesday nights. This was mainly due to the fact that Tuesdays were known as $2-Tuesdays. This meant that I could maximize the amount of liquor for the least amount of money. So, I rationalized my weekly walk into the downtown bars by just reminding myself that I was saving money by choosing to go. I could go down there with $20 to my name and live like a king - and I often did. Eventually though, that once a week ritual turned into a twice a week kinda thing.

The idea of going out and getting a few drinks with friends sounds harmless until you realize that going out twice a week and averaging around 5-6 drinks with each outing is not ‘a few drinks’. So, as these things often do, my drinking started to mess with my relationship. It was getting to the point where I would stumble home drunk at 3 am and just fall asleep on the couch, so I wouldn’t make up my significant other. Overall a pretty shitty scenario, if you ask me. 

This time around, there was no way I could make this something I quit slowly. This was something that needed to stop ASAP, so I did. It was not easy to tell my friends I couldn’t go out or that I was busy, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I looked at what my other options were and understood that each one was exponentially worse than just stopping. I looked up at this mountain that stood towering over me and with the realization of what might happen if I did nothing, the mountain became an anthill. This idea of putting it all into perspective is something I use almost every day now. I ask myself what might be the outcomes if I were to do nothing and what might happen if I were to try something. More often than not, it turns out that things that might make you scared or intimidated, might not really be all that bad. The idea of letting my friends down scared me, but the idea of disappointing my fiancé terrified me. That was it. Once that connection was made, breaking that addiction was easy. 

VIDEO GAMES

This one was by far the worst of the bunch. For a while now I have tried to get to the bottom of why I loved video games so much and why it seemed like I needed to spend countless hours on them. Ultimately I came to this conclusion - they are easy. Video games did not need me to get up and move around or even think all that much. I just need to use my fingers to make some character on the TV do something exciting. With time and practice, anyone can get good at them. It all comes down to muscle memory and reaction time. So long as you can get good at those two things, you will have a successful video game career. Had it been as simple as looking at it that way, it might have been easy for me to quit video games, but video games had much deeper roots in me. They were what go my through being the fat kid in high school ( arguably they were the thing that made me the fat-kid, but that is a talk for another day ), they also kept me connected with my friends once high school was over. 

My video game addiction really came to a tipping point when I started to play A LOT of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This was the game that really led me to realize just how addicted I was to video games in general. So, you can blame that game and my sudden realization for cutting me off before I could become some YouTube MLG star. I was putting in upwards of 8 - 10 hours a day on CS:GO and I spent most of that time practicing different map strategies with my friends. Easily one of the more dorkier things I have ever done with my time, but I digress. It was the quantifiable profession in my skill level at CS:GO that really led me to feel the need to keep playing it. That being said, I wasn’t just pumping time into that game. I was spending a lot of money on it as well. By the way, I wish that I was talking about some fake in-game currency that I got from cropping down trees or in CS:GO’s case, killing terrorist; I wish I could say that, but I can’t. It was real money

I would end up spending most of what I made working my sales job on CS:GO. The money spent went towards ONLY cosmetic items for the game. This really just boiled down to different gun camouflages and stickers to put on said guns. I easily spent close to $2000 on CS:GO by the time I stopped playing it. Keep in mind, this was a $30 game, but really you could argue it ended up being a $2030+ dollar game for me. 

It was not until I switched majors and actually started to care about what I was studying, that I could see just how much video games, in general, had been taking away from other parts of my life. I realized that I needed to get my priorities in order and I needed to do it fast. 

So, I made the decision to cut out video games altogether from my life - for the time being. I don't know why I’m so ambitious about goals and milestones for myself. I honestly think I might be some weird non-sexual sadist towards myself. I pain that comes from not being able to do something I have been so accustomed to doing, brings me some weird level of pleasure. Mainly because I get an understanding of just how addicted I was to that action and I get joy from knowing that I am lessening the power it had over me. 

This discussion of cutting them out, for the time being, was definitely the best one I could have made. Before dropping video games, I was sporting an abysmal 1.9 GPA. After dropping video games and focusing on school I brought that up to a 3.6 GPA. That boost in GPA would later allow me to transfer to a four-year university, where I currently am. 

CONCLUSION

The proof is in the pudding people. 

More often than not, you are fully aware of what you are addicted to. It is up to you to look inward and reflect. ask yourself if you are, at the moment, doing everything in your power to be the best version of you. 

Here’s the thing though, you have to want it. You have to set realistic and obtainable goals for yourself. There are some addictions that you won't be able to break in just one day. That just means you have to set small daily goals for yourself and better position yourself to make the right choices easier to chose. 

I believe that we are each working towards becoming a more perfect version of ourselves that we will never get to. But, it is the want and desire to be a more perfect version that will lead people down the path of self-discovery and personal growth. 

Take a deep look into your life right now and ask yourself - what am I addicted to?